Verifiable computation with access control in cloud computing

Abstract

With the tremendous growth of cloud computing, verifiable computation has been firstly formalized by Gennaro et al. and then studied widely to provide integrity guarantees in the outsourced computation. However, existing verifiable computation protocols either work in the secret key setting or in the public key setting, namely, work either for single client or for all clients, which rules out some practical applications with access control policies. In this paper, we introduce and formalize the notion of verifiable computation with access control (AC-VC), in which only the computationally weak clients with necessary access control permissions can be allowed by a trusted source to apply the outsourced computation of a function to a server. We present a formal security definition and a proved secure black-box construction for AC-VC. This construction is built based on any verifiable computation in the secret key model and ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CP-ABE). The access control policies that our AC-VC can realize depend on that realized in the based CP-ABE.